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Sunday, September 16, 2007

Grading Papers

This week I graded my first batch of papers. Most of them were fairly good. A couple of them were outstanding. Finally, a few could have used some additional work. But, considering that none of my students are native English speakers, the quality of the writing was quite high overall.

3 comments:

I don't say this to be rude, but having known a student in Bishkek, I am wondering how many of the papers were actually written by the students. I have some sense that students in the former CCCP have the habit of trading papers or assignments.

Sort of along the lines of frre trade following Ricardo's comparative advantage theory, students work towards developing their strengths and trade their excess (skills) to the mutual benefit of all.

I have not encountered anything that looks like plagiarism yet. Both the readings and the writing assignments I give are quite different from all previous versions of the classes. I brought the readings with me from the US. So there would not have been any opportunity to use a previous paper.

I assign a lot of short papers while everybody else here seems to have favored a few longer papers. There is less incentive to cheat on a one page paper worth 3% of the grade I think. Especially since I will let then rewrite it for a higher grade if they turn it into me early.

Yep, I understand those points. I've seen where final projects or papers are worth the majority of a students grades in the former CCCP (well, I've seen some similar stuff here also). I'm not sure how that works in actually teaching a student anything.

Having worked in a professional setting for quite a long time now, I can say that skills as a proof-reader and editor and abilty to revise work quickly and without a bruised ego go very far in the "real world". I don't think it was something that university studies every emphasized enough.